LaRue's Views 2005

The last couple weeks of the year are precious to me.

The library's budget has been adopted for the next year. The meetings tend to be put off till January, because lots of people have taken time off.

The frenzy of shopping is done. The parties are over. Now comes one of the true gifts of the year: time to think.

So much of our lives is conducted as if we were in some kind of speed trial. Or as I read in "The World is Flat," by Thomas Friedman,

"Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up.

Back in 1992, I reprised a column I'd written even earlier. I find that I still don't have much to add. So here it is again. Happy holidays!

What we really need is an all-purpose gift that will satisfy everybody. It should be suitable for all ages. It should require no assembly. It shouldn't need batteries. You shouldn't have to feed it. It should last forever. It should be constantly entertaining. The more the recipient uses it, the more he or she should like it.

And of course, it should be free.

There are many things parents would agree they want for their children. Health. Love. Family and friends. Success, defined as "a respectable job that pays well enough to provide all of the essentials, and some of the luxuries, of life."

But you know what I most want for each of my kids? I want them to have a rich inner life.

You can lose your health, your lover, even your family and friends. You can lose your job and your home. In disasters, you can lose your ability to put food on the table.

Sometimes you stumble across a book you didn't know you were looking for. For me, it was finding the library's copy of "The History of Torture and Execution," by Jean Kellaway.

Every time I come across the story of somebody stretched on the rack -- or wedged into the Spanish boot, or broken by thumbscrews, or victimized by any of a variety of infernal devices -- I feel an immediate sense both of horror and of recognition.

After college, I sold shoes for awhile. I was good at it, too. I broke some regional sales records, and got offered a manager position.

But I was young and restless, and really didn't want a career in a shopping mall. So I hit the road with a pair of shoes I sold myself.

And those shoes gave me blisters so bad that by the time I got to my uncle's in the Arkansas Ozarks, I could barely walk.

So my aunt took me to a big new store that had just opened up in Fayetteville. I'd never heard of it, but my aunt said the prices were great.

Just last week, the annual conference of the Colorado Association of Libraries brought over a thousand attendees to the Marriott Hotel at the Denver Tech Center.

I had the pleasure of participating in a "reactor panel" -- commenting on a keynote address by Pat Schroeder. Schroeder, former Colorado Congresswoman for some 24 years, is now the President of the Association of American Publishers.

Schroeder isn't too happy with librarians these days. How come?

I know people have wondered for years just what happens when somebody walks into the library with a question about local history. Well, now, thanks to Douglas County's government cable TV station, DC8, all our secrets have been laid bare.

It's in their recent "Kit Carson's Last Campfire," an original musical detailing the real story of Kit Carson in Douglas County. When challenged, the staff of the Douglas County History Research Center springs into action.

Recently, I wrote an article for a professional magazine about "the 21st century public library."

I outlined the broad process through which most public buildings are designed and constructed. The idea was to give librarians who haven't gone through all this a template to follow and to tweak.

Since then, I've been thinking more generally about the question, "What will tomorrow's library look like?"

Recently, I was elected to something called the OCLC Membership Council. OCLC is a company that has been around for over 30 years, since the dawn of library automation.

Nonetheless, OCLC is a little hard to define. It is...

* A world-wide libary catalog. OCLC is used by librarians in 109 countries to describe over a billion books, music and film recordings, theses, photographs, and other documents.

Last week, I took a few days off to give a talk at a library conference in Jackson, Wyoming.

I decided to drive. The library had gotten a complaint about a multiple-CD book, and this would give me a chance to listen to it.

The name of the book was "Light in August," by William Faulkner. Somehow, I'd never gotten around to reading Faulkner before.